Ian Forsyth, program manager at ARM, announced this week that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was onboard and the two companies were working together closely to make sure one or more versions of Windows support the new iteration of the low-power architecture.

Nandan Nayampally, head of ARM's processor marketing division, wrote toPC World in an email, "ARM works with all its OS and ecosystem partners to inform them on next generation technologies and enable their support."

The current version of Windows 8 for ARM chips -- Windows RT -- only supports 32-bit chips. Likewise, Windows Server 2012 is expected to bring ARM server chip support -- but no 64-bit support. That's not much of a problem because, as mentioned, 64-bit ARM CPUs won't land for another two years.

x86 software does not run natively on ARM architecture chips, or vice versa. That means that any application you want to run will need to have been freshly recompiled for Windows on ARM (WOA).

The grunt work is not limited to recompilation. Microsoft will have a lot of hard work ahead looking to port and optimize Windows 8 or its successor to work with the new ARMv8 64-bit instruction set extensions.

Arm processors are not socketed. You can get a tonne of them on even small boards. That's what Windows Server 2012 on ARM is all about. Don't expect to see them in systems designed for low-end uses (most will come in racks of nodes with each node sporting 28+ cores) for a while.

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